Thick workbooks with pages and pages of work are a child’s nemesis – especially over the summer. ThinkStretch summer workbooks are pressed to appear thin and accomplishable. The skill work is divided into bite size meals, because the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Kids will complete hundreds of math facts each summer, but in quick, distributed math fact ‘bursts’. Research has proven that this is the best way to maintain skills. Every child will read a minimum of 800 minutes – 20 minutes at a time – and complete 8 writing entries and over a dozen STEM activities. A lot of work, in a thin, accomplishable book!
One of the easiest ways to cut a summer of learning short is to frustrate a child. When a child falls behind in a typical summer workbook, facing a thick stack of pages filled with more work than is necessary to keep up his skills, he can feel full of anxiety, panic and desperation. Whether it is the first few weeks of summer or the last few weeks of summer, it becomes less and less likely that the workbook will be finished without a battle royale in the home.
ThinkStretch presses its books thin so that both parent and child recognize that summer learning is accomplishable all summer long. Like it or not, thick books bring with them the idea of too much work. Because the same amount of work can be accomplished in a thin package that encourages children to complete it, ThinkStretch made it a priority to design the grade specific summer workbooks with a minimum of pages and then to press them to make them appear even more doable.
Perception is reality – if a student thinks he can do it, he can; if he thinks he can’t, he never will.
